Shabbat shalom kol beit Yisra'el and Mishpachah and welcome to this fifth and final part of our series which is a call for unity in the Body of Christ. I have left the final topic to the end not because it is the least important but because we cannot properly understand it without an understanding of the other four which have preceeded it. And for those of you who have joined us at the end, the previous topics were the New Birth and Baptism, the Lord's Supper, the Scriptures and Holiness.

Our final topic is probably the easiest to talk about as well as being the most talked about in Christendom, and except when the world has become so unspeakably evil that it no longer cares any more, the most talked about in the world too, at least in some form. Or it used to be, at any rate, until the world got obsessed with so-called 'hate crimes'. I am, of course, talking about love.

Last time I asked if you would study 1 Corinthians 13 & 15, the first being the great Christian poem to love and the second the great exposition on the resurrection to which the first was looking. In a world where nine times out of ten people mean something else when they talk about 'love' than the subject of Paul's material, it's obvious we need to look carefully again, particularly as we are making the New Creation and Resurrection integral themes in this series.

When people talk of 'love' they are commonly referring the highly emotional state of 'falling in love', which they simply see as an overwhelming feeling. They might be confusing love with the selfish physical desire of what is commonly called 'lust'. But they seldom have in mind the kind of selfless, courageous, and forgiving love that Paul describes in the 13th chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians. One good way to check your own understanding of love is to substitute your own name or 'I' for the word 'love' and re-read the chapter. Very quickly you will see how your understanding and practice of love needs to grow. Why don't we do that right now, starting with verse 4 and reading to the end of verse 7, only we'll substitute the word 'love is' with 'I am' or the nearest equivalent. Maybe some of you have done this before. If you have, you'll know what a revelation this is!

Let's use the New King James Version, since that's what we have all got for the assembly, and read it together:

"I suffer long (= I am patient) and am kind; I do not envy (= I am not jealous); I do not parade myself (= I am not boastful), I am not puffed up (= I am not proud); I do not behave rudely (= I am not rude), I do not seek my own (= I don't demand my own way), I am not provoked (= I am not irritable), I think no evil (= I keep no record of when I have been wronged); I do not rejoice in iniquity (= I am never glad about injustice), but I rejoice in the truth (= I rejoice whenever the truth wins out); I bear all things (= I never give up), I believe all things (= I never lose faith), I hope all things (= I am always hopeful), I endure all things (= I endure through every circumstance)" (1 Cor.13:3-8, NKJV, compared with NLT).

And here is the same passage from a modern paraphrase, the New Living Translation, which I think does a really good job, but this time we will read it as Paul wrote it only we'll begin at the first verse and will tack on part of verse 8 too:

"If I could speak in any language in heaven or on earth but didn't love others, I would only be making meaningless noise like a loud gong or a clanging cymbal. If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I knew all the mysteries of the future and knew everything about everything, but didn't love others, what good would I be? And if I had the gift of faith so that I could speak to a mountain and make it move, without love I would be no good to anybody. If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it, but if I didn't love others, I would be of no value whatsoever.

"Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud or rude. Love does not demand its own way. Love is not irritable, and it keeps no record of when it has been wronged. It is never glad about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance. Love will last forever..." (1 Cor.13:1-8a, NLT).

"There are three things that will endure - faith (emunah), hope (tiqveh), and love (ahavah/chesed) - and the greatest of these is love" (v.13, NLT).

And yet, were you aware, that in the middle of this - the part I haven't read out yet - Paul is frustrated because something is incomplete:

"When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child does. But when I grew up I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly as in a poor mirror, but then we shall see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as Elohim (God) knows me now" (vv.11-12, NLT).

This is the bit we don't expect, isn't it? The poem doesn't just celebrate the fact that love is the greatest thing in Elohim's (God's) world. It doesn't just explain what love will mean in hard-edged practice (patient, kind, not jealous, not boastful, not insisting on our rights, and so on). It isn't, in other words, a poetic way of simply giving us a rule of life, another goal in the struggle for obedience or even Christlikeless. It goes much deeper, much further: it yearns over the fact that our experience of love, as of everything else that matters in this life, is decidedly incomplete. Something's missing, we know it, we want it, but we just can't seem to grasp it.

The way we are now, even as regenerated believers who are experiencing Yahweh's resurrection future in the here-and-now, is incomplete, a reason we need patience, kindness, etc.. We all of us know, when we're being honest, what we're supposed to be in Elohim's (God's) Grand Design and what we're supposed to be is, well, frustratingly 'incomplete'. We know it, we don't know exactly how or why, because we can only see partly anyway. And yet - and this is the important thing - and yet Paul is urging that we should live in the present, incomplete though we are, partly blind though we are, as people who are to be made complete in the future. And the sign of that completeness, that future wholeness, the bridge from one reality (the New Creation) to the other (the Old Creation), is love. That's the great hope, the yearning of the soul. And because we're incomplete in this world, we are required to continue living by emunah (faith). We just have to trust Him. Any other substitute will just make us frustrated and angry.

If doing that sounds impossible, if that sounds like a lot of very hard work indeed, you would be partly right - it does require a lot of hard (and painful) work (it's called dying to self, and you can't escape it) but it's not impossible. Consider, if you would, who this letter was being written to. Was this Paul's model congregation? The one he was the most proud to show off to the world as the ideal representative of the Kingdom of Heaven to those immoral pagans we spoke about last time?

No, this young congregation in Corinth was in a mess. You could say it was a disaster. They were ridden with personality cults. They were socially divided, rich against poor. They were spiritually divided, jealous of one another's gifts. They tolerated immorality. Their worship was chaotic, not unlike a lot of the charismatic groups today. Their grasp on the Besorah (Gospel) was shakey, and you'll remember from last time that they didn't understand the resurrection, a reason holiness was so absent from their lives. Oh, they had energy alright, they had a drive, but energy and drive don't necessarily equate with being on the right track. They were definitely going 'somewhere', even if they weren't sure in which direction, and we know from the writings of the sub-apostolic fathers that they did later on become a model congregation for a while.

Now I know that most of you would probably rather have a live congregation with problems like 'Bedrock Pentecostal Church' with everyone yelling 'Yabadabadoo' in tongues than a dead one like 'Tombstone Calvinist Baptist Church' offering false security or a legalistic one like 'Prouncounce-the-Name-Right-or-Die Messianic Synagogue' - though to be brutally honest, I'd rather not have all the problems of Corinth at once! Poor Paul, he goes through all their issues one by one, like a giant shopping list. Factions, quarrelling, gross immorality (remember the man living with his father's wife which even the pagans would have condemned?), the crazy tongue-speaking (remember, he said investigators would think they were crazy), drunkness - and at the Communion Table no less - aggressive feminism (some wanted to abolish gender distinctions), and like I said before, they didn't even understand basic Christian/Messianic doctrine like the resurrection. What a nightmare for an apostle to sort out! Pity the pastor having to be a shepherd to that lot! When I think back as a pastor in Norway having to sort out former Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, New Agers, Pentecostals, Charismatics, and Lutherans who came to us, that was tame compared to what Paul had to deal with in the wild west that was the pagan Roman metropolis of Corinth! And yet I guarantee you young ones, who one day become pastors, will probably have to sort out even worse messes. The whole of Christendom has become a giant Corinth. Yet love drove those apostels, pastors, evangelists and believers to do even as we are doing our best to do, to bring order out of chaos, and life in place of whitewashed tombs.

So Paul gets to work in his letter, each problem in turn, and he doesn't mince his words, does he? Each item is followed by a great discussion, each one hammered out on the anvil of the Tanakh (Old Testament) and some very serious Christian thinking. It's deep, heady stuff, theology the likes of which Israel has never encountered before. These quarrelsome Greeks and Romans had no idea what an inspired genius they had in their midst, far greater than their own pagan philosophers, yet humble and willing to be a martyr for the faith. And Paul's theology is not always easy to follow! He's misunderstood, whole cults have been made out of twisting his teachings. And then, in the middle of all that bedlam at Corinth, like Mozart's Ave Verum making its way through the noise of a factory until the machinery falls silent, if I can borrow N.T.Wright's great analogy, is the still music of chapter 13: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity (love)...I am nothing..." (1 Cor.13:1,3, KJV). Paradise arising in the middle of hell and driving it away... Marvellous! Incredible! Ecstatic! Sublime...

This isn't simply a wonderful poem stuck in to the letter at this point to change the mood. This poem on love, in both tone and content, is the still, quietly beating heart that makes sense of everything else. Everything Paul says in the rest of his letter is drawn together at this point. This is the beating heart not only of 1 Corinthians but of all Paul's writings. But at the same time you can't just cut it out with a surgeon's knife and make it your stand-alone 'gospel' and sing the Beatles' song, 'All You Need is Love!' - it was not created or inspired to be held aloft like some grizzy Mayan sacrifice atop a pagan temple to appease a never satiatable god of self.

Like the sun which needs planets to have a solar system and a purpose, so chapter 13 is the heart of Paul's message relative to the rest. It was sculpted by the Ruach (Spirit) to make perfect sense of all the rest he was saying, and in particular it makes sense of the final great discussion in chapter 15 in which he gives a full exposition of the reurrection and what it means. The chapter on love (#13) makes sense of the chapter on resurrection (#15). Only here, in the chapter on resurrection, can we in any case understand the incompleteness that Paul refers to in chapter 13 - the 'seeing through the glass darkly', the frustration of not everything fitting neatly together in this Old Creation world. Love without the physical resurrection is therefore hoplessly incomplete. Only the resurrection can perfect the imperfect relationships we have - our marriages, our friendships, our fraternities, and all in this physical dimension!

That is why the claim made by orthodox Christianity that there is no marriage in the resurrection, which is physical life resumed in its completelness and perfection, makes no sense whatsoever, for the purpose of "the Good News [which] I (Paul) preached to you (Corinthians) before" (1 Cor.15:1, NLT) was to perfect the relationships - with Him and with each other - that He crafted for life in this incredibly wonderful sphere, minus all the frustrations of the fallen state.

That is why similarly the Catholic insistance on a celibate priesthood and the claim that monasticism is superior to married life is such a perversion of what it is to be human because these contradict the physical design of man that is to be immortalised. Why do these people believe that these perfectly designed reproductive appendages are going to 'drop off' or become Darwinian-type 'vestigal organs', or be sandpapered down in some heavenly carpentry shop, with no further purpose? It is because deep down they don't actually believe in the phsyical resurrection, but in the superiority of disembodied spirituality where such appendages, and therefore gender, can obviously have no further function. Which, position, then, is the dysfunctional one?

The orthodox position, in this instance, is just a brand of pagan gnosticism, holding the physical creation in contempt and indirectly making a mockery of the resurrection. If physical matter is irredeemably corrupt, then the disembodied spiritual state should be held up as the highest state we can attain to, as nearly all false religion teaches, including branches of Christendom that simultaneously pay lip-service to the physical resurrection or redefine it to be something non-physical as so-called 'New Age Christians' do.

And my point is this: in implying or claiming this, it is altogether redefining love by stripping it of an entire dimension purposefully created by Yahweh and declared by Him to be "very good" (Gen.1:31). That is why you cannot defend, teach or embrace Christian ahavah-love without simultaneously defending, teaching and embracing the physical resurrection, which is the New Creation. It's what Christ died for! No physical resurrection and New Creation, no Christianity or Messianism.

But you have to do more than acknowledge the resurrection in your head - it has to supernaturally enter your heart as a new chayim (life)-force! And that means repudiating, absolutely and totally, all that false philosophy and morality, ancient and modern, that have proceeded on the assumption that evil is inherent in matter (gnosticism), and therefore that Elohim (God) and this physical world, albeit now temporarily fallen, are antagonistic to one another. The Bible teaches that evil entered the world from the outside, viâ the serpent, not that it was originally within. We must get rid of it in exactly the same way.

It should be obvious, even from initial observations, that the Old Creation world now contains little in the way of ahavah (love) because man has chosen to expell it and allow serpentine beings, the demons, to import all their wickedness and hatred in its place under the lure of false promises. The Good News of 1 Corinthians 15 is that the New Creation has broken into the old one. Yahweh's future has arrived in the present in the person of the physically risen Yah'shua (Jesus). He calls everybody to become people of this physical resurrection future, people in Messiah, people remade in the present to share the life of Elohim's (God's) future. As I said a couple of sermons ago in this series, Yah'shua (Jesus) is a kind of 'Stargate' linking us to that future in Himself. Our glorious future is assured so long as we are in Him.

Yes, our present experience, even our present Christian or Messianic experience, is frustratingly incomplete but so long as we accept that we will not keep on guilting ourselves. But in Messiah we have heard the complete tune - we know what that symphony sounds like and that one day we shall sing and play in tune with Him and all the Assembly of the Firstborn (Heb.12:23). Our present experience, with all its incompleteness, is meant to point us to the fact that we will one day 'wake up', as it were, from physical death, as one arises from a sleep, when our disembodied spirits take on matter once again and we are recreated - perfect, unblemished and immortal - for life on a perfected physical earth doing all the things we did before, only better and completely. This is what the resurrection is all about. And this is how we are supposed to view the context of a future life of eternal loving. And this is where the holiness I spoke of last time is itself revealed in its perfection.

Paul's poem on love is simultaleously 'strange' and powerful. Strange? Yes, because his revelation on ahavah (love) is not at all like the world's notions of 'love', religious or secular. The fact that he links ahavah (love) to the future resurrection which has been 'stargated' to us in the present through the death and resurrection of Yah'shua the Messiah (Jesus Christ), the fact that it is at this very moment incomplete in us, turns his poem away from being mere moralism ('please try harder to behave like this!') into a completely new understanding of love baffling to the world.

We all know that it's no good simply telling people to love one another. Do they usually do it? Preachers like myself are constantly exhorting believers to love, to patience and to forgiveness, which is necessary, for we do need to be reminded of our duty in an imperfect world. The trouble is, as long as we only think of it as a 'duty' we aren't very likely to do it, at least not consistently. And this is the whole point of 1 Corinthians 13 - love is not our duty, it's our destiny. It's the language the Saviour spoke, and we are called to speak it so that we can converse with Him. It is the main food they eat in Yahweh's new world, His New Creation, His resurrection planet, and we must acquire the taste for it here and now. If we don't acquire it now, how can we expect to possess it when we are resurrected, brought to judgment and assigned our several inheritances?

Love is the music Yahweh has written for all His creatures to sing, and we are called to learn it and practice it now so as to be ready when the Conductor brings down His baton. Love is the resurrection life, physical and spiritual - planet earth and the New Jerusalem - comingled and inseparably connected in perfect echadness or unity forever and ever. Ahavah (love) is at the very heart of the surprise of tiqveh (hope): people who truly hope as the resurrection encourages us to hope will be people enabled to love in a new way. Conversely, people who are living by this rule of ahavah (love) and chesed (mercy) will be people who are learning more deeply how to hope.

This is the message that underlies the gospel mitzvah (commandment) to forgiveness - which is also, of course,the mitzvah (commandment) to remit debts - "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors" (Matt.6:12, NIV). But forgiveness is not a 'moral rule' which comes with sanctions attached. Yahweh doesn't deal with us on the basis of abstract codes and rules like that. Forgiveness is a way of life, Elohim's (God's) derech (way) TO chayim (life), and specifically to resurrection life. And if you close your heart to forgiving ... then you close your heart to forgiveness! And that is the point of the terrifying parable in Matthew 18:21-35, about the slave who had been forgiven millions but who then dragged a colleague into court to settle a debt of a few pennies. He was not released from debtor's prison "until he had paid every penny" he owed to the king (v.34, NLT), in the same way Yahweh sends the unrepentant and wicked to Sheol until they have done the same thing and paid off their debts [1]. As N.T.Wright remarked, "if you lock up the piano because you don't want to play to somebody else, how can God play to you?" [2]

"For if you forgive your fellow men for the wrongs they have done to you, your Father will forgive you; but if you do not forgive your fellow men, then your Father will not forgive you either for the wrong you have done to Him" (Matt.6:14-15, Barclay).

That isn't a bargain we make with Yahweh, by the way - it's a fact of human life because it's a torah (law) built into the very fabric of creation. Not to forgive is to shut down a faculty of the innermost person, which happens to be the same faculty that can receive Yahweh's forgiveness. It also happens to be the same faculty that can experience real simcha (joy) and real grief. "Ahavah (love)...bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things..." (1 Cor.13:7, NKJV).

Of course, in our incomplete world, Elohim's (God's) gentle offer and demand press upon us as fearful things, almost threatening. But His offer and demand are neither fearful nor threatening. Yahweh in His gentle love longs to set us free from the prison we have stumbled into - the loveless prison where we refuse both the offer and demand of forgiveness. We are like a frightened bird before Him, shrinking away lest this demand crush us completely. But when we eventually yield - when He corners us and finally takes us in His hand - we find to our astonishment that He is infinitely gentle, and that His only aim is to release us from our prison, to set us free to be the people He made us to be. But when we fly out into the sunshine, how can we not then offer the same gentle gift of freedom, of forgiveness, to those around us? That is the emet (truth) of the resurrection, turned into prayer, turned into forgiveness and remission of debts, turned into ahavah (love) and chesed (mercy)..into agapé. It is constantly surprising, constantly full of tiqveh (hope), constantly coming to us from Yahweh's future to shape us into the people through whom He can carry out His work in the world.

Obviously unity cannot possibly exist without this resurrection-linked love. I have left this to the very end of this series, mostly so that I could explain it thoroughly, but in practice it is where we must always start. We have come to the end of our five-stepped journey, I hope it has blessed you, and that it will encourage you in your efforts to find realistic unity with other believers of different traditions. The final gathering will probably not at all occur in the way we expect so we must begin to reach out and explore and go where the Ruach (Spirit) leads us. In some ways this series has been quite deep and complex as we have tried to sort out historically some of the confusuing intertwined theology and language that obfuscates the simple truths we are reaching for. I have many times stated my purpose in all of this and I'll end by stating it once again: my goal is to know Elohim (God), help others do the same, and hold fellowship with them in love. Amen.

Endnotes

[1] See the Universal Salvation website
[2] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (SPCK, London: 2007), p.301

Acknowledgements

[1] Tom Wright, Surprised by Hope (SPCK, London: 2007), 'Reshaping the Church for Mission', pp.245-303